Jonathan Blanks @ Libertarianism.orghttp://www.libertarianism.org/rss/people/464
Keep up with your favorite authors at Libertarianism.org!en"Pay No Attention to the Man Who Won't Stand Behind the Voting Curtain"http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/pay-no-attention-man-who-wont-stand-behind-voting-curtain
<div class="field-name-field-authors">
<span class="field-label">Authors</span>
Jonathan Blanks </div>
<div class="field-name-body">
<p>I already have made my <a href="http://blanksslate.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-i-voted.html">personal reasons for voting</a> clear.</p><p>However, my friend, colleague, and sometimes-editor Aaron Ross Powell has an <a href="http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/voting-moral-wrong#tmhmdj:hBP">essay up today about the moral case against voting</a>. I understand where he’s coming from, and I’ll even concede the philosophical argument he makes in it.</p><p>But government and the elections that shape it are practical matters, not philosophy, so I respectfully disagree with its broader message.</p><p>There is a practical reason to vote, particularly for libertarians as a—gasp!—collective.&nbsp;</p><p>Representative government is responsive to social needs, norms, and change, albeit in a very limited way. Political parties evolve, and respond to those whom they feel most obligated. The math certainly justifies the individual’s decision not to vote, but collectively, voting is quite meaningful.</p><p>I don’t understand the libertarians—some of them among the most prominent in the nation—who insist on supporting presidential candidates like Mitt Romney because the alternative is so much worse. Even if that were so, it’s fundamentally absurd to dependably toe the party line in fear of the alternative and expect that party to become more libertarian at the same time.</p><p>The incentives for libertarian acquiescence to either party for fear of the other is a recipe for irrelevance.</p><p>I often vote for a libertarian not because I identify as a capital “L” libertarian—I don’t—but because I want to express my displeasure with both major parties and in a way that shows my preference for smaller government.</p><p>Aaron writes:</p><blockquote><p>If you cast a vote today, there’s a pretty high chance that in morally significant ways you’re acting just like those friends mugging the old man. You may think there are good reasons for doing this, that a world where you vote for violations of basic human dignity and autonomy will be more livable—happier, freer, wealthier, more equal—than one where you don’t. But you’re still party to countless immoralities. You’re still expressing approval as politicians fail to live up to basic moral standards—and as they do so in your name.</p></blockquote><p>By paying taxes on everything that I buy, and the income that I make, I&#8217;m already a party to these governmental immoralities. In many ways, I&#8217;m sure my money has gone to all sorts of terrible things both through taxation and participation in the market economy. My freely given or relinquished dollar does not sanction everything the recipient of that dollar does with or without my dollar.<span style="line-height: 1.3em;">&nbsp;</span></p><p>Likewise, my marginal preference for one major candidate or another&#8212;or neither, as I&#8217;m primarily discussing here&#8212;expresses only a preference, not an endorsement. A vote in one election does not convey approval for everything that person does, and there are alternative means&#8212;writing, calling, petitioning, organizing&#8212;that can later influence the behavior of that recipient while in office.&nbsp;</p><p>And the more <em>voters </em>I can sway holds a lot more weight than a bunch of libertarians who are sitting-out on philosophical principle.</p><p>Whether or not we’re in a “libertarian moment” right now means less to me than communicating that the major parties will not, in fact, get my vote until they start paying more attention to civil liberties and reforming our criminal justice system.&nbsp;</p><p>By myself, it’s not saying much.</p><p>But in toss-up districts and states, enough people who vote libertarian can, by shifting the margin, change the outcome of an election. A party that is on the losing end of that would be wise to cater to libertarian issues in the future.</p><p>Yet, like clockwork, the libertarian corner of the Internet is riddled with arguments against voting today and, of course, is most likely to be read by people who agree with them. Effectively, libertarians are taking themselves out of political consideration.&nbsp;</p><p>Not my idea of effective policy change.</p><p>Philosophy has its place, as it informs our beliefs and ideals. However, removing yourself—and, more damning, those whom agree with you most—from the election process eliminates the largest incentive for politicians to care what you and those like you believe.</p><p>It shouldn&#8217;t be this hard to explain to libertarians that incentives matter.</p><p><em>This essay originally appeared on <a href="http://blanksslate.blogspot.com/2014/11/libertarians-pay-no-attention-to-man.html">The Blanks Slate.</a></em></p> </div>
Tue, 04 Nov 2014 18:06:07 +0000Aaron Powell2497 at http://www.libertarianism.orgHow Equal Rights for Black Americans Still Aren't Equal Enoughhttp://www.libertarianism.org/columns/how-equal-rights-black-americans-still-arent-equal-enough
<div class="field-name-field-authors">
<span class="field-label">Authors</span>
Jonathan Blanks </div>
<div class="field-name-body">
<p>When American children are taught about the Civil Rights Era, the focus tends to be on laws like Jim Crow, people like Bull Connor and Martin Luther King Jr., and issues like equality and justice.</p><p>The thinking goes today, to simplify the reasoning on the right and among libertarians, that those times were long ago, the laws are gone, Bull Connor and his ilk are long dead, and we have fairness before the law and everything else is just a matter of applying oneself now.</p><p>But the changes from those times have, in fact, been gradual. There’s nothing to indicate, and certainly no defining moment, when racism ceased to be a problem for blacks and other minorities in America. Coming as far as the nation has in a relatively short amount of time is impressive, given the way racism was ingrained in the American culture, politics, and education. But part of that progress was due to the explicit societal and governmental acknowledgement that laws and society made life very unfair for a segment of the population. We’re getting to a point where that recognition is becoming less and less obvious, and the remnants of centuries of racism linger and continue to affect millions of Americans.</p><p>After all, if equality were simply a matter of codification, Jim Crow never would have happened. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments should have rectified the legal disparities that affected black Americans, but it took more than a century for Congress to pass legislation to say “No, we really mean it.”</p><p>But then, given the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence—that all men were created equal is a self-evident truth—why were those amendments necessary in the first place? Though the Declaration was never legally binding, its opening lines became the primary and guiding principle of the nation. What gives?</p><p>The answer is simple: American rhetoric and law has been hypocritical since its inception and nowhere has this been more evident than in legal protections and law enforcement for black people.</p><p>Black Americans have, for the entire history of this country, faced a legal system that treats them differently than white citizens. It’s gotten better, sure, but this enduring legal double standard demands closer examination.</p><p>Let’s start with why rights are important.</p><p>As we’ve seen over the years, property rights, even more than tax rates, are more important to the development of markets and growing economies. Simply, if a nation-state wants investment—of both capital and effort—people who make those investments must have a reasonable belief that a return on that investment is possible in a successful venture. A state with shaky property rights—whether expropriated by the state, such as Venezuela, or seized and distributed to the kleptocratic oligarchy, like Russia—is much less likely to draw foreign capital because property can be seized at the whim of the elites. Places where investments are protected by the rule of law, on the other hand, attract capital because investments are protected from state-sanctioned theft.</p><p>Civil rights are really no different.</p><p>If civil rights protections are widely denied, particularly to one group of people, because they are routinely ignored and capriciously violated by police officers, those rights lose all tangible meaning to that population. Mistreatment by authorities—whether official policies like Stop and Frisk, or tolerance of police brutality, corruption, or homicide—corrodes the integrity of a community. The government loses credibility by effectively nullifying its own authority by arbitrary enforcement of laws (government powers) and the protections for citizens (civil rights).</p><p>Cooperation with law enforcement must suffer as the trust required between a police department and its citizens is eroded by the rightly perceived unbalanced enforcement. Criminals become emboldened through weakened law enforcement capabilities, and the citizens become less safe. The community divests itself from the relationship with the police and societal norms become threatened.</p><p>In absence of civil rights protections—in tandem with the limited educational and economic opportunities among certain populations—the incentive to play by the rules of society naturally decreases. A person still has to survive, and absent decent job opportunities or avenues for self-improvement, illicit means for income become more attractive.</p><p>More troubling, aggressive policing can fuel more violence (e.g., in the drug trade) and mistrust of the police may result in outright antipathy, as neighborhoods come to view police as an occupying force. Police naturally redouble their efforts to quell the violence and, in so doing, may increase the mistreatment of citizens because the antipathy is mutual.</p><p>Such is the plight of many black neighborhoods in America today. What happened and continues to happen in Ferguson, Missouri is a breakdown of the social order. This is not caused by an ethereal and undefinable “black culture.” It’s a government-driven problem that manifests itself in a rightfully fed-up mass of people who know the protections of society don’t really apply to them and those they care about—young black men, specifically.</p><p>The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s was a multifaceted effort by a group of people that were sick of legal and extralegal mistreatment by its government and the white-dominated society from whence that government came. The symptoms of that mistreatment took many forms, and one of the most prominent was citizen abuse by law enforcement.</p><p>Today, we still have this same problem. Law enforcement is more aggressive across the board, but particularly in poor, minority communities. Black people make up a vastly disproportionate percentage of arrested, convicted, and incarcerated in the United States—the most carceral nation on the planet. The Drug War is the most effective tool to harass and incarcerate young black men, but the underlying problem—that black people are treated differently, and thus fundamentally unfairly—is as old as America itself.</p><p>This is not to excuse criminality. Individuals are ultimately responsible for their own behavior and should be held accountable for their actions, particularly those of violence.</p><p>However, a population subjected to regular abuse by police, with little hope of economic success or anything but the most modest personal achievement, will have predictable outcomes. The proposed remedies for what is broadly called “black uplift” so often involve working strictly from within the ‘black community,’ without taking into account the pressures and inputs forced upon many of these communities by aggressive policing and discarded civil rights.</p><p>A recent book along these lines and against liberal government intervention in black Americans’ lives is titled “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Please-Stop-Helping-Us-Liberals/dp/1594037256">Please Stop Helping Us</a>.”</p><p>“Please Stop Killing and Abusing Us” would be a better start.</p><p>As it is virtually impossible to maintain stable growth in a developing economy without property rights, it is similarly difficult to maintain a flourishing community in absence of civil rights. Those rights must be secured by a police force that engages and respects the community it serves. For many communities, that requires explicitly recognizing and rectifying the rift between the police and its black inhabitants.</p><p>The law may be colorblind. But, in America, law enforcement never has been. It’s time that police come to terms with that.</p><hr /><p><a href="http://rare.us/story/how-equal-rights-for-black-americans-still-arent-equal-enough/">Originally published</a> on <a href="http://rare.us/">Rare.us</a>.</p> </div>
Sat, 04 Oct 2014 19:45:00 +0000gbabcock2440 at http://www.libertarianism.orgRace Matters in Ferguson—and in Modern Americahttp://www.libertarianism.org/columns/race-matters-ferguson-modern-america
<div class="field-name-field-authors">
<span class="field-label">Authors</span>
Jonathan Blanks </div>
<div class="field-name-body">
<p>Recent events in Ferguson, Missouri are a painful reminder about how the government often treats its black citizens.&nbsp; At times, it appeared the police were using the Bill of Rights as a checklist of laws to violate rather than the restraint on their powers it is supposed to be. And while it may be easier or more comfortable to think of this strictly as a government-citizen problem, the ever-present spectre of the past is worth remembering, <a href="http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/looking-back-look-forward-blacks-liberty-state">as I have written previously</a>:</p><blockquote><p>Most criminal laws since Reconstruction are facially “colorblind,” but enforcement clearly is not and has never been. Context matters, and in the American context, race matters.</p></blockquote><p>The chasm between the black and white reactions to the stories of isolated looting and nearly nightly assault <em>en masse</em> by police with tear gas and other heavy-handed tactics is no mere coincidence. Countless video and photographic images of police officers pointed loaded weapons at unarmed civilians exercising their constitutional rights were on full display and broadcast around the world. Yet, many people—<a href="http://www.people-press.org/2014/08/18/stark-racial-divisions-in-reactions-to-ferguson-police-shooting/8-18-2014_02/">particularly white people</a>—believe such appalling actions were justified, undercutting the notion put forth by many libertarians that requiring police to wear body cameras will be sufficient to stem police abuse of citizens regardless of color.</p><p>The lack of empathy <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/5978551/study-racism-criminal-justice-stop-and-frisk-reform-support">is not isolated to the Ferguson protests</a> either.</p><p>Unpleasant as it is to recognize, race continues to play a role in American society. For this reason, libertarians should be cognizant of how policies affect black people, often disproportionately, and think about how that blatant unfairness might affect communities who have and will continue to face abuse by their government and by society at large. Changing the weapons—be it the Drug War, the militarization of police, or “Stop &amp; Frisk”—won’t eliminate the longstanding antipathy between many communities and their police. Those policies should be eliminated, for sure, but the underlying problems of disproportionate enforcement and abuse will remain unless we purposefully address them. Ignoring racial disparities will not make them go away.</p><p>I’ve written on these issues <a href="http://www.libertarianism.org/blog/i-have-dream-50-years-later">here</a> and <a href="http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/looking-back-look-forward-blacks-liberty-state">here</a>, and my libertarianism.org podcast on this topic can be downloaded or streamed <a href="http://www.libertarianism.org/media/free-thoughts-podcast/why-arent-there-more-black-libertarians">here</a>.</p> </div>
Fri, 22 Aug 2014 19:55:39 +0000gbabcock2382 at http://www.libertarianism.orgLooking Back to Look Forward: Blacks, Liberty, and the Statehttp://www.libertarianism.org/columns/looking-back-look-forward-blacks-liberty-state
<div class="field-name-field-authors">
<span class="field-label">Authors</span>
Jonathan Blanks </div>
<div class="field-name-body">
<p>Libertarians tend to think of freedom as either a means to an end of maximum utility—e.g., free markets produce the most wealth—or, in a more philosophical sense, in opposition to arbitrary authority—e.g., “Who are you to tell me what to do?” Both views fuel good arguments for less government and more personal autonomy. Yet neither separately, nor both taken together, address the impediments to freedom that have plagued the United States since its founding. Many of the oppressions America has foisted upon its citizens, particularly its black citizens, indeed came from government actors and agents. But a large number of offenses, from petty indignities to incidents of unspeakable violence, have been perpetrated by private individuals, or by government with full approval of its white citizens. I would venture that many, if not most libertarians—like the general American public—haven’t come to terms with the widespread, systemic subversion of markets and democracy American racism wreaked on its most marginalized citizens. Consequently, libertarians have concentrated rather myopically on government reform as the sole function of libertarian social critique without taking full reckoning of what markets have failed to correct throughout American history.</p><p>Take, for example, the common libertarian/conservative trope: “We believe in equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.” Most people, outside of the few and most ardent socialists, should believe that is a fair statement. But to say such a thing as a general defense of the status quo assumes that the current American system offers roughly equal opportunity just because Jim Crow is dead. Yet, that cannot possibly be true.</p><p>Think of the phrase “Don’t go there, it’s a bad neighborhood.” Now, sometimes that neighborhood is just a little run down, doesn’t have the best houses, doesn’t have the best shopping nearby, or feeds a mediocre school. But, more often, that neighborhood is very poor, lacks decent public infrastructure, suffers from high unemployment, has the worst schools, and is prone to gang or other violence. And, in many cities—in both North and South—that neighborhood is almost entirely populated by minorities.</p><p>There are only two conclusions possible when facing the very real prospect that thousands or millions of Americans live in areas you warn your friends not to go, even by accident: Either everyone in those areas is a criminal, or is content to live among and be victimized by criminals; or there is some number of people, and probably a large one, trapped in living conditions that cannot help but greatly inhibit their opportunities for success and advancement. As Ta-Nehisi Coates lays out in the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/">latest issue of the<em> Atlantic</em></a>, that those neighborhoods are racially segregated is no accident. Jim Crow’s death is worth celebrating but hardly sufficient for establishing equal opportunity in any meaningful sense, especially when our society still effectively traps people in these conditions by both law and custom, based in no small part on their race.</p><p>So what is a libertarian to do about all this?</p><p>As I mentioned in <a href="http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/why-are-there-so-few-black-libertarians">my previous essay</a>, libertarians must recognize that racism still plays a practical and tangible role in the lives of American blacks. So long as libertarians brush racism aside as incidental or irrelevant to public policy, people who see and feel its effects in their neighborhoods, in their schools, and in their interactions with police, are unlikely to take what libertarians say seriously. Disparate treatment in education, criminal justice, and the economy are facts of life for many black Americans, and libertarians should take an active role in combating it, both through policy suggestions and in our personal lives. Part of this requires a deeper understanding of American history, and specifically the history of American racism.</p><p>On some basic level, representative government reflects the will of the people it serves—that is, those to whom government actors feel most accountable. Historically speaking, within the United States, such a government and a coalition of individuals and institutions—bankers, shopkeepers, restaurateurs, police officers, teachers, judges, landlords, election officials, bartenders, homeowners, receptionists, doctors, and other white citizens—exerted power that threatened to disrupt or upend the lives of black individuals at whim over many years. This white supremacy was true throughout most of the United States, with varying degrees of brutality and certitude. Racism has been part and parcel of America since its inception, often to the extent that racism not only trumped common decency and the Rule of Law, but economic self-interest. The dominant libertarian assumption that rational economic self-interest would trump racism if government just got out of the way fails to reckon with more than 200 years of evidence to the contrary.</p><p>Consequently, the strident libertarian argument against positive law and government writ large flies directly in the face of the historical black experience. The federal government protected the rights of freedmen and established schools during Reconstruction, only to abandon blacks to Southern white terrorism in the name of States’ Rights. Positive law destroyed Jim Crow, breaking up both formal and informal segregation in accommodations not just in the South where it was law, but throughout other parts of the country where it was standard practice within a supposedly free market. The federal government took an active role in criminal justice because local police often did not investigate anti-black terrorism and murders—or, if they did, sometimes testified in the murderers’ defense. And today, governments offer jobs with security and benefits in a job market that still disfavors blacks. This is not to say that blacks are particular <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/29/why-arent-there-more-black-libertarians-libertarian-opposition-to-big-government/">fans of Big Government</a>, but all of these government actions addressed problems in private society—ranging from indifference to murderous hostility—that should test anyone’s faith in an unfettered free market. This does not mean that libertarians should embrace positive law going forward, but simply to recognize Madison’s wisdom that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.”</p><p>To wit, while libertarian finger-pointing at New Dealers and early Progressives as racists whose policies excluded or punished black people is based in truth, it is not entirely convincing 70-100 years hence. Whatever one can say about their political preferences, American Progressives have been consciously and conspicuously inclusive of blacks and other marginalized people in the recent past—to their great credit. To equate the Woodrow Wilson Progressives and their Southern Democrat allies with the multiracial, multiethnic coalition that elected Barack Obama is simply unreasonable. Libertarians should challenge the economic wisdom of longstanding Progressive policies, but take away their social programs and you still have a United States fully inhospitable to equal rights for blacks in the early 20<sup>th</sup> century—for which there was no evident or forthcoming free market solution. (This I note with a touch of irony, given that there is a prevalent libertarian assumption that the dearth of black libertarians is traceable to black ignorance of the benefits of free markets, perhaps enabled by poor public schools. Yet one may argue that libertarians are largely ignorant of how exclusionary American markets were when its moneyed participants were left to their own devices.)</p><p>Individuals are the source of racism and race bias, and the institutions they construct are conduits for both, even when individual agents within an institution may not be cognizant of it. The policies and practices of even well-meaning people put into a system that has traditionally abused minorities is likely to continue to do so, even with new inputs. Systems that operate under choices made by people with biases can still result in outcomes detrimental to a race or group, thus effectively punishing blacks and other people outside of power. This is why focusing on a single policy program, like the Drug War, in some ways misses the forest for the trees when it comes to how blacks and the criminal justice system have interacted over time.</p><p>Certainly, the Drug War has been the largest driver of the disproportionate black and Hispanic prison populations in recent years, both through the incarceration of non-violent offenders and prosecuting those people involved in the violence associated with prohibition regimes. But the tensions between blacks and the American justice system did not start with Nixon’s War on Drugs in 1971.</p><p>Before Emancipation, law enforcement hunted down fugitive slaves who fled to the North. After Reconstruction, local law enforcement stripped the recently won civil rights of blacks, including the right to peaceably assemble, the ability testify against white people, and equal protection of the laws. Some offenders, picked up for charges like vagrancy—that is, being black and without a job—were sold back into civil slavery to corporations the profit of local sheriffs’ offices and judges under the “convict lease” system—not unlike slave leasing in the antebellum South. Years later, police officers were among the civil servants who sicced dogs, swung batons, and unleashed fire hoses on protesters in the 1960s. Special Weapons [A]nd Tactics teams, or SWAT, were established in the 1970s to help quell white fear of racial unrest and militants such as the Black Panthers. The 1980s saw drug enforcement ramp up, turning American inner cities into war zones. And perhaps most famously, in the 1990s, a home video showed several Los Angeles police officers beating black motorist Rodney King within an inch of his life. Today, SWAT-style raids as standard operating procedure, anecdotes of “driving while black,” and the documented abuse of Stop-and-Frisk tactics in New York City evince the continued tension between law enforcement and black Americans. If the Drug War were to end tomorrow, any belief that the tensions between blacks and the police would stop must be based on entirely ahistorical assumptions.</p><p>Most criminal laws since Reconstruction are facially “colorblind,” but enforcement clearly is not and has never been. Context matters, and in the American context, race matters. So when we, as libertarians, talk about what we can do to change people’s lives for the better, we have to look at exactly what they’re facing and what practical solutions look like. For black Americans, many of those problems have been around for a very long time, in one form or another, and they are directly tied to race.</p><p>So, yes, libertarians should continue to argue vehemently against the Drug War, for school choice, and in support of other policies that have been shown to help all people. But it is simply not enough to believe that, given free choices, citizens will make decisions that maximize their own benefit, ultimately to the benefit of all people. The United States’ long history with both public and private discrimination is a testament to the power of racial prejudice and its power to overcome rational self-interest. And given the numerous statistics now available—from <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through-good-times-and-bad-black-unemployment-is-consistently-double-that-of-whites/">unemployment disparities</a> to <a href="http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html">tracking hiring practices</a> to <a href="http://gawker.com/meet-miami-gardens-the-stop-and-frisk-capital-of-ameri-1583348024">police harassment</a>—it is clear that lingering prejudice contributes to unequal opportunities for American blacks, on top of the myriad obstacles they may face in their neighborhoods and schools.</p><p>Libertarians need to actively combat racial prejudice instead of relying on assumptions that the market will work it all out on its own. If libertarians are going to maintain that government answers to racism are usually inappropriate, then libertarians must be among those leading the private, society-driven remedies to injustice. It is not enough to be passively ‘not racist’—libertarians must be actively anti-racism. To do anything else is to accept the status quo and hide behind the logic of markets, despite the deeply seated, inherent illogic of racism.</p><p>This means, inter alia, discussing racial impacts of substandard schools (perhaps allaying fears that school choice will lead to more<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/in-southern-towns-segregation-academies-are-still-going-strong/266207/"> segregation academies</a>), the pernicious effects of antagonistic policing, and explaining whose jobs will likely be lost due to a minimum wage hike. It means trying to remedy the longstanding disconnect between those who push for punitive laws and those who suffer under them. It means supporting community programs to encourage entrepreneurship and funding <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/uncf-receive-25-million-koch-gift/">scholarships for aspiring business leaders</a>. It means talking to black people and audiences like intelligent individuals whose life and family histories may temper enthusiasm for free markets, and not a mass of people too ignorant or dependent to believe in a theoretical version of freedom unknown to them. It means vocally and unequivocally distancing ourselves from people with longstanding racial baggage, be it Confederacy revisionism or career obsessions with black pathology. Then, maybe, libertarians’ “It’s not us, it’s you” message of liberty would turn into something different: a message better received by people with memories of how duplicitously the words “freedom” and “liberty” have been used in this country.</p> </div>
Fri, 27 Jun 2014 16:58:20 +0000Aaron Powell2318 at http://www.libertarianism.orgWhy Aren't There More Black Libertarians?http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/why-are-there-so-few-black-libertarians
<div class="field-name-field-authors">
<span class="field-label">Authors</span>
Jonathan Blanks </div>
<div class="field-name-body">
<p>Throughout the history of the United States, government at all levels has been an oppressive force on people of color, especially black people. The republic was founded with African chattel slavery <a href="http://www.senate.gov/civics/constitution_item/constitution.htm#a1_sec2">implicitly</a> <a href="http://www.senate.gov/civics/constitution_item/constitution.htm#a1_sec9">recognized</a> in the Constitution. After Reconstruction, state and local governments enacted harsh laws and stripped rights from freedmen, ushering an era of white American terrorism that was aided, abetted, and sometimes perpetrated by law enforcement itself.&nbsp; One hundred years after Emancipation, police sicced dogs and firemen turned fire hoses on men, women, and children alike who were peacefully appealing for equal treatment, dignity, and individual rights. Today, police officers sometimes harass, profile, and abuse black people in cities all over the nation, contributing to the disproportionate number of blacks and other minorities in jails and prisons in the country that leads the world in incarceration. Given this historical experience with the government, why aren’t there more black libertarians?</p><p>First, libertarianism is an ideology or philosophy that is fully separated from the red team/blue team worldview that dominates American politics. While many Americans consider themselves “<a href="http://www.cato.org/blog/more-data-fiscally-conservative-socially-liberal-voters">fiscally conservative and socially liberal</a>,” not many spend the time and effort to delve into exactly what they believe and why, let alone the centuries-old philosophical underpinnings which may describe their views on some level. Given the many practical concerns people face on a daily basis, the myriad media at the disposal of the average American for learning and entertainment, the inscrutability of philosophers’ writings, and the so-named “dismal science” of economics, perhaps the better question is: why are there any self-identified libertarians in the first place?</p><p>More seriously, given libertarianism’s rather esoteric foundations and the dominance of the Democrat/Republican political dichotomy, that an already marginal belief system is making few inroads in minority populations still fighting for political and electoral relevance makes sense. That black Americans, who disproportionately suffer from economic disadvantage, are more concerned with putting food on the table and roofs over their heads than contemplating Ludwig von Mises’s praxeological observations in <em>Human Action</em> should surprise absolutely no one.&nbsp;</p><p>But it is more than that.</p><p>A common libertarian narrative involves looking backward to better times, back to the Founding when the Constitution was respected—to a time of freer markets and something much closer to constitutional purity. Yet, to those of us who must look to bills of sale and property lists to find our ancestors, the look back is with much less yearning.</p><p>Today, we’re closer to a more perfect union than we’ve ever been before, even with all the government interference and wasteful spending, because more markets are opening up to more people, not just here but <a href="http://humanprogress.org/">around the globe</a>. Yet, by some accounts, libertarians and other fellow travelers are talking about “taking back the country” and returning to some misbegotten glory days of yore that very few blacks recognize. This isn’t to say that there’s nothing to complain about—the government leviathan is worthy of nearly all the scorn heaped upon it. But the unprecedented wealth in our country, the democratization of information thanks to the Internet, and the learning potential with the advances in technology available to more and more people of nearly all income levels is a testament to human achievement in spite of government. Part of this, I think, comes from a different recollection of how our laws and society work, not how we want them to.</p><p>The version of “capitalism” of the early to mid-20<sup>th</sup> century was inseparable from the Jim Crow South and was held up by the United States during the Cold War as the apotheosis of freedom and the antithesis of communism. Given the black experience in America—being subjected to oppression, segregation, and terrorism at home, even after coming home from serving in every war to defend it—a collective hesitancy to embrace capitalism as it existed is understandable, if not wholly rational.&nbsp;</p><p>Furthermore, coupled with this version of capitalism was the United States’ aggressive foreign policy moves to use smaller, weaker states in the global war on communism, subverting and killing socialist reformers and toppling their governments, particularly in Africa. Pan Africanism coincided with the African-American Civil Rights Movement since the early years of the last century. Although the United States involvement in combating Pan Africanism, including its support of South African Apartheid, was arguably part of a broader effort against Soviet influence, it was viewed by some as an extension of American racism blocking the freedom of black Africans. Whether or not this is true, the perception that American freedom and capitalism were incompatible with the anti-colonial freedom sought by Africans or political equality of African-Americans was not uncommon. Communism, while economically foolhardy, paid substantial lip service to political equality, and was consequently embraced by many of those locked out of America’s supposedly “free” markets—not just blacks, but also women, homosexuals, and other marginalized minorities. This capitalist America and its government were not friendly to freedom for those unlike them, both here and abroad.</p><p>Malcolm X, for one, was very critical of the U.S. government’s international meddling, particularly in Africa, as well as its social and governmental hypocrisy when confronted with the plight of American blacks. Although embraced by the radical Left, Malcolm’s speeches and writings were not in the spirit of Karl Marx or even Howard Zinn—he preached personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, mistrust of the government, and the unquestionable right to self-defense. This isn’t to say Malcolm was a libertarian, but the ideas that permeate the American Dream have also been prevalent throughout black America’s political and social history, in some form or another. The United States is, thankfully, in a much different place than it was in the 1960s, but the desire to be free and prosperous is just as alive among black Americans, and it has been there for centuries. Perhaps, then, the problem is in the messaging.</p><p>Barry Goldwater, generally believed to be the most libertarian major party presidential candidate of the past hundred years, famously voted against the Civil Rights Act, the most liberating piece of federal legislation since the end of Reconstruction. He had his reasons—he didn’t believe the federal government had the power to compel private businesses and individuals to accommodate those they didn’t want to. Federalism and freedom of association guaranteed by the First Amendment compelled Goldwater to vote his conscience. On paper, it is a defensible—perhaps even laudable—act of principle, absent of context.&nbsp;</p><p>But those principles had been used as weapons against black Americans, and esoteric concerns seem less important than being unable to eat or get a hotel you’re willing and able to pay for as you drive across your own country. This sort of adherence to principle at the expense of the tangible freedom of millions of African Americans sent a clear message of whose liberty received priority. Fairly or unfairly, holding such a man up as a hero of liberty sends a mixed message, at best.</p><p>Subsequently, libertarians have been associated with the Lost Cause, Civil War revisionism, and the politics of white resentment. The infamous Ron Paul newsletters of the 1980s dripped with racist, homophobic rhetoric in order to drum up support—and fundraising—for the Texas congressman. Separate from that, Paul has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xec68vtqwp8">given speeches</a> asserting the South was right in the Civil War, <a href="http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-libertarian-defenses-confederacy-states-rights-are-incoherent">preposterously</a> arguing that chattel slavery was not the catalyst for the bloodiest war in American history, and repeating the canard of “States’ Rights”—an argument often used to also support state-sponsored segregation.&nbsp; Paul’s ascension to standard bearer of the modern libertarian movement in recent years invariably calls into question the motivations of its adherents and their dedication to civic equality of minorities.</p><p>Too often, libertarians discuss rights and what people will do if the government gets out of their way, but before government was active in furthering racial equality, history shows that both public and private actors worked in concert to deny equal opportunity and truly free markets—often under the guise of “freedom.” This isn’t libertarians’ fault, but if libertarians want to have any voice in suggesting what the future should look like, we must grapple with the past and explain how and why this sordid history won’t repeat itself. Moreover, American libertarians must not only confront the nation’s racist past, but how the legacy of that racism affects people today. Part of the disconnect between blacks and libertarians is likely related to the perception of racism’s prevalence and its impact on everyday lives of black Americans. If libertarians continue to downplay or dismiss racism’s role in criminal justice, economic uplift, and perceptions of black Americans, black Americans are unlikely to accept ideas from people who don’t see their own world for what it is.</p><p>The history of black people in the United States is perhaps most quintessentially American story of freedom and liberty. Yet, libertarians have been loath to reconcile the vast chasm between America’s promise and its delivery on that promise to date. Unfortunate associations, political alliances, and duplicitous rhetoric have diminished the libertarian message of equality of opportunity and the power of markets in a free society. This should change, and in my next essay, I will lay out how libertarians can be more race-conscious without compromising our principles of individual liberty.</p> </div>
Fri, 23 May 2014 16:00:58 +0000Aaron Powell2281 at http://www.libertarianism.org"I Have a Dream," 50 Years Laterhttp://www.libertarianism.org/blog/i-have-dream-50-years-later
<div class="field-name-field-authors">
<span class="field-label">Authors</span>
Jonathan Blanks </div>
<div class="field-name-body">
<p>Fifty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered “I Have a Dream,” one of the most stirring and memorable speeches in American history. In the five decades since he laid out his dream at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, our country has made great progress toward racial equality by destroying Jim Crow, expanding voting rights, and more thoroughly integrating our society. Today, black people hold seats in Congress, the Cabinet, Fortune 500 company boardrooms and, of course, the Oval Office. The United States has come a long way in fifty years, but many of King’s complaints are still relevant today. These inequities are impediments to the personal liberty of millions of Americans.</p><p><em>But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.</em></p><p>De jure segregation is past, but de facto segregation is very much alive and well in <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2013/08/segregation_in_america_every_neighborhood_in_the_u_s_mapped_along_racial.html">cities all over the country</a>. Neighborhood segregation often leads to effectively segregated public schools—and those majority black schools often underperform against regional and national benchmarks. Although graduation rates have increased for black students across the board over the years, black academic performance still lags behind whites on net. This academic disparity effectively puts young blacks at a disadvantage as they enter college, the workforce, and the global economy.</p><p><em>The Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.</em></p><p>Policies such as New York City’s so-called Stop and Frisk effectively suspend the Fourth Amendment for young black men. Even though the program is facially colorblind, testimony from <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/03/whistleblower-shares-secret-audio-at-nypd-trial.html">New York police officers</a>, interviews with <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/22/nypd-stop-and-frisk-interviews-brownsville-residents">New York City residents</a>, and the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/13/nypd-stop-and-frisks-15-shocking-facts_n_1513362.html">NYPD’s own statistics</a> show the discriminatory outcome of the policy. Touted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as an anti-gun measure, the more than four million stops have resulted in approximately 8,000 guns recovered, rendering the policy not only discriminatory and invasive, but highly ineffective.&nbsp;</p><p>Other policing practices further alienate young blacks, especially young black men. The concentration of drug enforcement and other aggressive police tactics exacerbates an antipathy between the police and those whom are supposed to ‘serve and protect,’ to the point that police and the policed alike feel like <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/18/swat-cop-says-american-ne_n_3776501.html">they’re in a war zone</a>. Outside black neighborhoods, black youths are often the target of police contact or harassment in shopping malls, open air hangouts, or walking down the street. It is unimaginable for many Americans to feel so alien in their own hometowns, but to many young blacks who venture out of their neighborhoods, they’re treated as if they don’t belong there.</p><p><em>I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.&nbsp;</em> &nbsp;</p><p>The state of American criminal justice has been so punitive to people of color that it has been dubbed <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431">the New Jim Crow</a>. Though I don’t compare the two, it is undeniable that the criminal laws—especially drug laws—have been disproportionately inflicted upon blacks and Latinos. Despite drug use rates comparable to whites, America’s prisons are almost literally overflowing with people of color, hundreds of thousands of whom are serving long sentences for non-violent drug offenses. Families have been destroyed, lives have been ruined, and yet the illicit drug trade continues virtually unabated.&nbsp;</p><p>The enforcement of these laws have grown <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americas/dp/1610392116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1377707899&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=rise+of+the+warrior+cop">increasingly militarized</a>, causing violent—and sometimes abusive—interactions between police and putative suspects. People who live in heavily policed black neighborhoods, are regularly subject to police misconduct, police corruption, and traumatizing raids and interrogations, whether they are guilty of a crime or not. Despite being facially race-neutral laws, the segregated nature of our cities and the concentrated policing efforts in those areas—known as ‘Broken Windows’ policing—the front lines of the drug war are most often found in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.&nbsp;</p><p><em>Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.&nbsp;</em></p><p>Black Americans, like all Americans, want to be treated with dignity and the equal protection of the laws so they too may pursue happiness. The problem, however, is that although blacks have grown up hearing about the same American Dream as whites and others, experience didn’t match up with the lofty goals and ideals of justice and equality.</p><p>For much of our nation’s history, even after being freed of literal chains, blacks were shut out of markets, jobs, accommodations, education, and myriad other social and professional associations. Blacks were hunted by bands of terrorists, often with implicit or direct help from law enforcement, and the courtrooms provided, at best, inconsistent redress to black victims.&nbsp;</p><p>The fundamental tenet of “equality under the law” is that the rules apply to everyone equally. This isn’t just about doing good for the sake of goodness, but rules that are applied equally encourage participation in mutual prosperity. A system that seems rigged to an outsider is, conversely, likely to lead to a rejection of that system. King’s Dream is an exhortation for full inclusion in the American Dream and a rejection of the half-measures and arbitrary exclusions of the time.</p><p>While Jim Crow was effectively killed by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, all was not suddenly perfect in American race relations, and the gap between the American Dream and American reality remained a wide one.&nbsp;</p><p><em>Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.&nbsp;</em></p><p>How likely are you to move to a place where random street harassment by police authorities is commonplace? How likely are you to move where xenophobia is the norm and you’ll be treated as an outsider as long as you live there, nearly entirely based on the color of your skin? It will be harder for you to get a job for these same reasons, and thus harder to get out of the ghetto you’ll live in. Now imagine this happens in your native country, in your hometown.</p><p>This is what it’s like for many to be young and black in America.&nbsp;</p><p>“Free markets,” “equality,” “liberty,”: three concepts that form the core of libertarianism and undergird the American Dream, but have, ironically, been cruel and hollow words to black people for the majority of our nation’s history. This is simply because the rules under which those concepts operate didn’t apply to black people. What is a free market when you can’t even sit at the lunch counter to buy a sandwich, let alone apply for a job? What is equality when all your schools and school supplies are substandard? What is liberty when you’re harassed by a police officer for being the wrong color in the wrong place?</p><p><em>I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.</em></p><p>We can eat where we want now and stay in any hotel we can pay for, but our public schools are failing and they fail black kids especially. Black unemployment rates were already higher than all other American ethnic groups during good economic years and are devastating during down years. American policing is misguided in focus and often discriminatory in practice. That Bull Connor is no longer in the streets siccing dogs is progress, but pre-dawn commando raids are not the hallmarks of justice.</p><p>These concepts are the essence of freedom and are fundamental to the American Dream, but they must truly apply to all Americans for Dr. King’s Dream to become a reality.&nbsp;</p> </div>
Wed, 28 Aug 2013 21:05:04 +0000ebanks2003 at http://www.libertarianism.orgA response to commentershttp://www.libertarianism.org/blog/response-commenters
<div class="field-name-field-authors">
<span class="field-label">Authors</span>
Jonathan Blanks </div>
<div class="field-name-body">
<p>I would like to take a few moments to address some of the comments and criticism that came my way after <a href="http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-libertarian-defenses-confederacy-states-rights-are-incoherent">my essay</a> went live yesterday. First and foremost, thank you to the many commenters here on libertarianism.org for your thoughtfulness and, for the most part, respect shown to me and fellow commenters. Other places the essay was shared or linked did not reflect nearly the level of dialogue or courtesy. This, I think, reflects well on the online community Aaron is trying to develop here. I cannot address the hundreds of comments and tweets here, but I want to address some of the more recurring themes of the criticisms.</p><p>Many people launched into the traditional back-and-forth about whether the North acted imprudently in the war, whether Lincoln was a tyrant, and other post-secession arguments that weren&#8217;t at all germane to my point. I made no claims about whether a libertarian should support the Union cause, actions, or anything at all about Lincoln. The most basic formulation of my argument was this, as put forth this morning by my colleague Jason Kuznicki <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/JasonKuznicki/status/172706180320346112">on Twitter</a>, “Secession must be justified morally, not legally. If a given secession is for slavery, it&#8217;s not justified.” <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/JasonKuznicki/status/172706826780024832">He added</a>, quite astutely, that “Secession is the decision to step out of an existing political order, so it&#8217;s a category error to try to justify it legally.”</p><p>Union-backing is by no means a requirement to recognize the fundamental truth of the argument above. If communists are fighting fascists, it is not necessary for libertarians to pick a side. However, if libertarians start defending one as the definition of freedom, others would and should object. I didn&#8217;t and don&#8217;t ever make the argument that the North entered into the war with the greater cause of freedom beyond the preservation of a Union based on human equality, but it is clear that the South&#8217;s actions&#8212;the catalyst for war&#8212;were explicitly motivated by freedom&#8217;s suppression.</p><p>Relatedly, another common misunderstanding also raised itself in the comments: that slavery wasn&#8217;t the principal reason for secession and thus was not the fundamental cause of the Civil War. This is simply revisionism. That the South had other qualms with the Northern states’ governmental prerogatives is not at all surprising. Indeed, disagreement is a fundamental assumption of republican government. (See generally <a href="http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm"><em>Federalist 10,</em></a> but also note that the Confederate soldiers at the Crater weren&#8217;t yelling “Spare the white man, kill the tariff!”) As the Cornerstone speech I cited makes clear, however, those other concerns were secondary to slavery, the “immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” There is no plausible counterfactual in which the South secedes for any other reason or group of reasons, despite enduring regional concerns and political disagreement. If you subtract slavery out, you remove the immediate cause for secession, which removes the cause for war, and the litany of complaints about the Union&#8217;s actions are moot because they never take place. The essay dealt with the secession and whether or not it was morally justifiable, and that justification must be based on the secession&#8217;s root cause: chattel slavery and white supremacy. Jumping past that crucial point of the essay to what the Union did in response to the unjust secession, though worthy of discussion in its own right, misses the point entirely.</p><p>Lastly, I included the abuses of blacks by the Southern states not to inflame those who disagree with me, but to support my point that the white supremacy upon which the South relied to maintain slavery was more than just a quirky feature of the time. That the South seceded “for economic reasons” and to “preserve their way of life” are but timid euphemisms for “to protect their slave economy based on white supremacy.”&nbsp; This ugly truth should not be obscured by such nondescript misdirection and leads only to more defenses of tyranny in the name of liberty. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Southern governments installed the Black Codes&#8212;punitive laws against blacks based on the antebellum Slave Codes&#8212;demonstrating the clear and unmistakable priority Southern governments gave to oppressing black people. (This, like the secession itself, prompted the federal government to intervene further, resulting in Radical Reconstruction) The establishment of Jim Crow after Reconstruction only furthers the point that oppression had been and continued to be at the forefront of so many of the Southern states’ policies.</p><p>“Liberty” does not and cannot mean “tyrannical license of individual states,” and any secession explicitly built upon the perpetuation of such injustice should not and must not be conflated with it.&nbsp;</p> </div>
Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:26:31 +0000jblanks798 at http://www.libertarianism.orgWhy “Libertarian” Defenses of the Confederacy and “States’ Rights” are Incoherenthttp://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-libertarian-defenses-confederacy-states-rights-are-incoherent
<div class="field-name-field-authors">
<span class="field-label">Authors</span>
<a href="/people/jonathan-blanks">Jonathan Blanks</a> </div>
<div class="field-name-body">
<p>There is a strain of libertarian contrarianism that holds that the Confederate States of America were within their “rights” to secede from the Union. Such contrarianism on this particular topic is detrimental to the larger cause of liberty because the logic of this argument relies upon relinquishing individual rights to the whim of the state. Indeed, as there is no legal or moral justification for supporting the Confederacy in the Civil War, it is impossible that there could be a libertarian one.</p><p>The legal argument against secession is straight-forward. Beyond the simple fact that most countries don&#8217;t provide for their own dissolution at the outset, the Constitution is not silent on the use of force by the federal government. Article I Section 8 clearly grants Congress the power to put down insurrections, as the South was well aware. As recently as 1859, that power had been used by then-Union colonel Robert E. Lee to put down John Brown&#8217;s mindless and bloody raid on Harpers Ferry.</p><p>But to support the Declaration of Independence is to support secession. Thus, from the outset, it is nearly impossible to defend the American idea—that the people may separate themselves from an oppressive government in order to govern themselves—without accepting secession as a legitimate political action under certain circumstances, at least. This, however, does not necessarily mean that all secession is justified. In the Declaration, Jefferson writes, “Prudence&#8230;will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes,” necessarily implying that some separations are indeed imprudent and any such separation should be judged on its individual merits. A predictable and stable adherence to the Rule of Law is the indispensable tenet of any form of just government, and so the dissolution of that government must be preceded by systemic injustice or other reason that appeals to higher or natural law. Without this ordered liberty and deference to individual rights, laws cease to mean anything other than the imposition of will by man upon man.</p><p>Because Confederate-secession defenders will not typically make arguments in favor of chattel slavery, they rely instead on the assumption that secession is an unbounded right and thus a state may leave a country for whatever reason it chooses. To accept this premise, one has to bypass moral judgment on the cause of secession, yet affirmatively assign a morality to secession as a matter of preferred political procedure—in common parlance as “states’ rights.” This turns the assumption of individual rights on its head, if the federalist procedure is to supersede the right of exit of any group or individual within that state, as the Confederacy’s slave economy unquestionably did.&nbsp;</p><p>People who imagine themselves free have, in theory, a right of exit if and when they choose to separate themselves from the state in which they live. Suspending for the sake of argument the economic hardships that may entail, the right of one&#8217;s own separation—an individual secession, if you will—remains. Except in the Confederacy, where no such right existed for the slaves for which the Southern states unquestionably and proudly seceded.</p><p>Mirroring the language and purpose of the Declaration, the Southern states explained to the world the purported righteousness of their actions and listed the reasons why prudence dictated they sever their ties to the American Union. Four Southern states—South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Mississippi—made clear their rationale for secession. Simply glancing over <a href="http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html">these four documents</a> leads the reader to the conclusion that chattel slavery was the primary cause for separation. The following are excerpted from the four declarations of secession.</p><p>Georgia:</p><blockquote><p>The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.</p></blockquote><p>Mississippi:</p><blockquote><p>In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.</p><p>Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery&#8212; the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.</p></blockquote><p>South Carolina:</p><blockquote><p>The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.</p><p>…</p><p>The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”</p><p>These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burdening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.</p><p>We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States.</p></blockquote><p>Texas:</p><blockquote><p>Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery—the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits—a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?</p></blockquote><p>For all the world to see, to justify their actions, and with no less than 82 direct references to slavery or servitude contained in those four documents, the seceding states proudly asserted that slavery—and the perceived threat of its abolition—was the primary and compelling motive for their secession and, consequently, the singular cause for the war. Slavery was not merely a feature of the Confederacy&#8212;it was its defining characteristic.</p><p>Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens famously defended the secession and its new constitution in his “<a href="http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76">Cornerstone Speech</a>,” asserting:</p><blockquote><p>But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. <strong>This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.</strong> Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. <strong>But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted.</strong> <strong>The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature</strong>; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. <strong>Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew. </strong>(emphasis added)</p></blockquote><p>While it would be disingenuous to say that the North began the war with the intent to end slavery, it would be nothing short of delusion to say the South did not fight to preserve both slavery and the white supremacy upon which it relied.</p><p>A war for slavery is, by definition, a fight against the individual right of exit. It takes an extraordinary leap for a libertarian to assign rights to a state which are denied to the people or an individual. Properly understood, states have powers, not rights. The fundamental tenet of rights theory is that a man or woman has property in him- or herself and that he or she voluntarily gives up only a small portion of his or her rights when joining a state. The right of exit is indeed a solemn one, but its root lies with the individual, not a body of elites and their self-interested whims.</p><p>In nearly every other circumstance, especially dealing with war, a libertarian is often the first to ask <em>cui bono</em>? <em>To whose benefit </em>would war be? What is the real justification for this war? For nearly every other war, the arguments for war are questioned and usually debunked by libertarians, most of whom oppose war under any non-essential circumstance, often stridently. Yet, the idea that the slave-holding elite would separate itself from the rest of the nation to protect its financial interest in holding other human beings as property is, somehow—to some people who espouse the rights of the individual as sacrosanct—lumped in with a fight <em>for </em>freedom?</p><p>As an aside: that most soldiers of the Confederacy didn&#8217;t have slaves or think they were fighting to preserve slavery is <em>non sequitur</em>. The argument against the South&#8217;s actions in the Civil War has nothing to do with the motivations of its soldiers. The blame lies with the actions of the political elite. There are many Americans who went to fight and die in Vietnam who thought they were fighting for the preservation of liberty—when, in fact, they were fighting on an arbitrary side in a civil war that had nothing to do with the United States or its way of life. (That communism makes people less free is a truism, but I&#8217;m less convinced the people of Vietnam were better off with civilians subject to napalm attacks and a million war dead during American operations than they were under Ho Chi Minh and the more open style of communism that has defined Vietnam in the five decades hence.) It&#8217;s remarkably sad that so many died for a lie, but that doesn&#8217;t change the essence of the lie.</p><p>The anti-libertarian results of the Civil War are evident. The federal government centralized a great deal of power in the post-war years and that sort of power is well-understood to be very dangerous to individual liberty. Yet, it is not as if the abuse of individual rights by the states ended at Appomattox. For the century following the end of Reconstruction, the southern states (and, to a lesser extent, some northern states) implemented laws and customs which systematically stripped the rights of blacks. From voting rights to freedom of contract and free association, the southern states oppressed their black citizens. This retarded the post-war southern economies—stultifying a portion of the population relegated to substandard educational accommodations and economic opportunities—despite protestations from some apologists that the market would work it all out eventually. Similarly, the <em>Atlantic</em>’s Ta-Nehisi Coates and <em>Slate</em>’s Matt Yglesias show that the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/compensation/251886/">economics of and rhetoric supporting the antebellum slave system were thriving</a>, despite claims that the ‘peculiar institution’ was dying for reasons wholly separate from the war. Indeed, most libertarians know that the laws and powers of a state can sustain bad economic policy—seemingly in perpetuity. The states’ abuses of their own people, from the Founding to the 1960s, time and time again replayed the folly of giving the states the power to oppress its own citizens. Laws, custom, and ‘good-enough’ economic growth trumped individual rights and opening the markets to all Americans. There was no guarantee that slavery would end on its own without direct intervention.</p><p>As James Madison wrote in <a href="http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm"><em>Federalist 51</em></a>:</p><blockquote><p>If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.</p></blockquote><p>Experience has also taught us that the individual states too must have a check on their powers, and the power of its elites may not be used to exploit the least powerful citizens. As an innocent but detested minority cannot depend on the beneficence of the majority or its elite institutions, an (albeit imperfectly) neutral federal authority is a better check on the tyranny of the state than no check at all. That the southern states’ particular tyranny was cloaked in federalism is not an argument in federalism&#8217;s favor.</p><p>Those who defend the Confederacy in the name of liberty today must assume, against all historical evidence, that rationality and economic benefit would have otherwise trumped the exploitation and irrational hate that drove the institution of slavery, the rebellion to defend slavery, and the Jim Crow South to avenge slavery&#8217;s defeat. That the Southern states used the power restored to them after Reconstruction to keep their citizens in poverty and deny them their rights as American citizens is the best argument for the federal government in living memory. That this is often used by the Left and others to presume benevolence in directives from Washington is unfortunate to libertarians who believe in a bounded federalism that protects the rights of the individual while providing states the power to be the laboratories of democracy that they were intended to be. Libertarians would better serve the cause of liberty and decentralization by recognizing that absolutes—such as granting the state absolute authority to do as its elites wish—are as sure a road to tyranny as amassing uncheckable power in a chief executive. There is nothing libertarian about granting any government so broad authority in order to quash the fundamental rights of the individual, a power inherent to an unbounded state “right” to secession.</p><p><em>A portion of this essay was excerpted and edited from a 2009 blog post by the author.</em></p> </div>
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:37:10 +0000jblanks775 at http://www.libertarianism.orgBlack History and Libertyhttp://www.libertarianism.org/blog/black-history-liberty
<div class="field-name-field-authors">
<span class="field-label">Authors</span>
Jonathan Blanks </div>
<div class="field-name-body">
<p>Libertarians joined much of the country in honoring Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday on Monday, the national recognition of his transcendent fight for liberty and civil rights. Countless quotes attributed to King streamed on Twitter and peppered Facebook walls of people of nearly every ideological strain. Not at all coincidentally, most of the quotes reflected the political thinking of the sharer—implying a <em>post facto</em> confirmation that the sharer’s deeply held beliefs would comfortably answer the question “What Would MLK Do?” As much as I respect Dr. King’s heroism, dedication, and belief in justice—and I would like to think there would be issues where he and I would be in solid agreement if he were alive—I am quite sure my views and his would sharply diverge on many of the issues today. This doesn’t mean I don’t admire him or think he shouldn’t be commemorated, but I’m not going to pretend or imply he’d espouse or condone libertarianism. Nevertheless, Dr. King seems to be the lone exception to an unwritten rule that libertarians should embrace only strictly classical liberal or free market understandings of liberty. Consequently, many of today’s libertarians are notably silent about the most profound fight for liberty in the history of the United States.</p><p>My problem with MLK Day has always been that making it so explicitly about him overshadows the countless thousands who preceded him in “the Struggle”—the continuous fight for civil rights of which the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century was a part—and those who were his contemporaries and, at times, adversaries. Much like I have been deeply critical of the cult of personality that surrounded Obama in 2008 or that has been associated with the Ron Paul R3VOLution since then, I find the elevation of men to virtual sainthood is detrimental both to the individuals at the center of the admiration and to the causes they purportedly represent. Furthermore, in the cases of MLK and other historical figures, it is all the more unfair that we try to map ancestral leaders onto modern political or ideological movements in order to give gravitas to current efforts. At best, efforts to co-opt a dead hero to a cause of which they were never made aware seems anachronistic and insufficient. At worst, it’s pandering. In between, there is a range of self-righteous ignorance and ahistorical self-service that denigrates both the subject and the co-opting party.</p><p>Individuals are complex and imperfect. Admirable acts are sometimes done by less-than-admirable people and <em>vice versa</em>. Any references to long-gone heroes should be made in context and without the implication that they would stand with the people of today doing their idea of ‘the Lord’s work.’ To that end, I would like to try to bring the ideas and history of African-Americans’ fight for freedom to a libertarian audience without saying these heroes of liberty would necessarily fit within the traditional libertarian framework. Indeed, much of the Struggle was fought from abject poverty and enforced illiteracy, concurrent to but wholly separated from (and thus ignorant of) the classical liberal tradition and free market economics. Yet, this could not possibly mean the Struggle was demeaned or less valid because of it.</p><p>It is remarkable that American libertarians—so often eager to discuss freedom in nearly every conceivable iteration—rarely address African-Americans and the Struggle for civil rights in America. Slavery is long gone, but it is hardly coincidence that the descendants of slaves have accounted for disproportionate percentages of Americans in poverty and incarceration in the 150+ years hence. Save Emancipation and America’s reluctant recognition of the 14<sup>th</sup> Amendment by way of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, the government has consistently (though not exclusively) been a boot on the necks of African-Americans, hindering progress and true equality. Yet libertarians tend to shrink away from acknowledging race for fear of involving themselves in “identity politics” and thus rarely discuss the government’s legacy of racial oppression.</p><p>If libertarianism is to be something more than free markets—libertarianism’s guiding principle is, after all, liberty—then its adherents should recognize that liberty is the end of, not just the means to, a better society. Thus, when looking for people to hold up as exemplars of liberty, we need to stop thinking “Was ______ a libertarian?” and start thinking: Did ________ fight for liberty? Is there something we can learn from him about what it means to be free? What exactly was he fighting against<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">—</span>and what did his denied freedom teach him? What mistakes did he make<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">—</span> and what mistakes by others resulted in the denial of his freedom? How did the government fail him? How did society fail him?</p><p>These questions are all eminently more interesting than assertions that Frederick Douglass was a libertarian or that certain putatively libertarian writers were on the right side of the Struggle—true though they may be. Such discussions amount to libertarian trivia—much the way “black history” is treated each February: 30-second sound bites between segments of <em>How I Met Your Mother </em>and <em>Two and a Half Men.</em> The context in which people found themselves as they struggled for their own freedom invariably colored their perception of the world around them, and these perceptions must be taken into account when looking back upon them from a modern vantage point. This is not to necessarily excuse their behavior or opinions that we may hold in low regard today, but in order to understand what the world looked like to them and how they chose to engage it.</p><p>Whether Libertarianism.org is the best venue to tackle these questions and contextualize the Struggle for liberty within the ‘Land of the Free’ remains to be seen, but I look forward to the conversation so long as Aaron will have me. I thank him for the opportunity to share some of this history—and my perspective on it—with you.</p> </div>
Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000Aaron Powell465 at http://www.libertarianism.org